A foray into collecting light

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Time Lapse

I’ve been keen to try a time lapse for some time, so after a little light reading, I decided to set my camera in manual, disable the image preview, auto focus, and manually set a white balance, I calculated that to end up with a 45 second video I would need 1080 photos to capture an hour’s worth of action (or inaction) – and I chose to shot jpg for this project. I did the calculation of 24 frames per second of final video. To cut a long story short, the light started to go, so I trimmed the length form 45 seconds to 30 seconds to more closely match the nearly 740 frames I actually took.

I was reasonably pleased with this first attempt, although I thought the light would hold a bit longer. I will look at experimenting with aperture priority mode, to see if the varying exposure time crates flicker. Also, I will look to shooting back in RAW, and then do a bit more postprocessing.

I would like to try a few other time lapse projects, but I am currently limited to a 5 second interval – I may have to look at getting an intervalometer that is capable of taking more than 400 exposures and at intervals of at leats 0.5 seconds. I think I would like to shoot a scene with lots of people moving around, maybe over a 20 minute period – 1500 frames should do the trick!